Ok maybe i'm a little dense lol, but i fail to see why atari tokens strictly for author incentive is bad? It's not like it cost the company money.

Well, first, Cryptic has simply announced it is a policy that players cannot receive AT by any means through the game, and that is a policy which is not ever, ever going to change.

However, besides the fact that Cryptic said so, there are two reasons for it that are fairly obvious. One is that the licensing agreements Cryptic holds which give them access to the Trek IP almost certainly do not allow them to sublicense that IP to players, which is what it would happen in effect if they allowed players to derive any sort of income from creating UGC content. Since AT are purchased with real life dollars, and therefore directly evaluable in money terms, they have a dollar value equal to their retail price. The other problem is that in some places, most notably the U.S., players and Cryptic would face serious tax issues if players started getting nontrivial amounts of income from their missions; Cryptic would be forced to start reporting payments, and players would owe income tax on the value, where players were getting AT income through plays of missions that they created.